WWALS Watershed Coalition advocates for conservation and stewardship of the Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, Little, and Suwannee River watersheds in south Georgia and north Florida through education, awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen activities.

GA-EPD also wanted to know what if the catch basin fills up?
Valdosta’s answer: tanker trucks to ship the sewage from the Withlacoochee Wastewater Treatment Plant to the Mud Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant.
Or the other direction, if needed.
That sounds like a fine idea.
Although it doesn’t address the question of what if the heavy rains fall directly on Valdosta and both WTPs fill up.

Tom Mirti of SRWMD described
Florida water quality testing,
but didn’t mention that FDEP’s monthly testing isn’t made public until four months later.
He did mention that FDEP is now testing for
sucralose.
Merrillee Malwwitz-Jipson, who requested that, was sitting right there.
Thanks to her and Jim Tatum for coming from Florida to this meeting.

Valdosta City Manager Mark Barber said Valdosta was still testing at the state line,
which caused me to ask
why I didn’t get any results for those locations this year in response to open records requests, then?
Valdosta Utilities Director Darryl Muse said that was because they haven’t actually tested at the state line this year.
He also complained that he had staff working 100 hours a week.
Which makes me wonder whether the city of Valdosta is really giving him what he needs,
or whether he hasn’t asked for everything he needs.

Anyway, people were rightly impressed with how much Valdosta has done and with their current plans.
However, there is still room for improvement.

Here’s the agenda for tonight’s Special Called Meeting of the Valdosta City Council,
with business of Valdosta Utilities presenting to the dozen Florida counties.
You may wonder why you haven’t seen this City Council meeting on Valdosta’s website or in the Valdosta Daily Times.
Well, Georgia Open Meetings law only requires one notice on the front of the venue and a notice to the newspaper of record 24 hours in advance.

Pretty clean at the bottom of Vallotton Park
(33.3 cfu/100 ml), but rather dirty at the top of Drexel Park (533 cfu/100 ml), on Onemile Branch, with the site of last week’s FOG sewage spill in between;
that’s what WWALS water quality testers Sara Squires Jones and Scotti Jay found Monday.
These numbers are for the disease-causing bacteria E. coli.
The state limit is 200 colony-forming units per 100 mililiters of water (cfu/100 ml).
That 533 reading is still below the state’s 1000 limit for real alarm,
but it’s still not good.

This map shows in red the spill location on Ashley Street near La Jalisco Supermercado,
with the testing locations in blue, at North Lee Street near Mr. B’s IGA at Vallotton Park,
and at Williams Street at the east end of Drexel Park.

It’s great the
#Trashtag Challenge is getting people to clean up litter,
but remember the straw and the sea turtle.
Let’s also get on with fixing the problem, which is throwaway plastic
and other discardable containers and wrappers.